Paul Seely has coached Catholic Youth Organization basketball for 39 years. "You just want the kids to have fun and continue to develop," he said.

Paul Seely has coached Catholic Youth Organization basketball for 39 years. "You just want the kids to have fun and continue to develop," he said.

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Paul Seely, center, takes a break with his men's league players at the Our Lady of the Lake school gymnasium in Seattle on Feb. 23.

Paul Seely, center, takes a break with his men's league players at the Our Lady of the Lake school gymnasium in Seattle on Feb. 23.

Photo: Mike Urban/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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CYO coach's forty years for love of the game

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Paul Seely won his 300th game as a basketball coach a couple of weeks ago. Of course, nobody knows that for sure except Seely because no one else keeps records on Catholic Youth Organization basketball. They're the games nobody but the parents attend, the box scores the newspapers won't bother to print, played mostly by kids who didn't or wouldn't make their school teams.

But it is this little, mostly ignored corner of the sports world where Seely, 61, has planted his flag, where he has made a difference. He'll never be able to say he coached an NBA star, but every trip to the grocery store might bring an encounter with a man whose life he has touched.

"Paul is about getting them to enjoy the sport, to appreciate it and have some fun before going off to a career at Microsoft or something," said John Dwyer, who has coached with Seely for 16 years. "It's just a real treat working with him."

Thirty-nine years after he began coaching baseball, his first love, on Mercer Island, Seely calls the gym home, coaching boys from sixth grade through high school. While countless parents have come and gone -- and his own three sons long since graduated -- Seely is the mainstay.

"It used to be dads, and sometimes moms, wanted to coach, but I'm seeing the opposite now," he said. "They don't mind the early skill stuff, the dribbling drills and positioning and that, but when they have to start thinking about running plays and defensive sets and offensive sets ... (parents) just seem to feel like they ought to have somebody a little more conversant with the game coaching them."

CYO is a church-affiliated league for kids who don't play on their school teams. The practice schedule is less rigorous, everybody has to play at least a quarter in each game, and losing isn't the end of the world. Seely, who is affiliated with Our Lady of the Lake, picks up teams where there's a need and tries to stick with the same group for three seasons.

Seely said his usual team includes a couple of guys who can play, another couple who are athletic but inexperienced, and the rest varying degrees of works in progress.

"You don't have to be a great coach to coach Ken Griffey Jr.," he said. "It's taking kids along the way. It's helping the lesser kids to be average, the average kids to be better and making sure the good kid stays good."

The trend toward specialization in youth sports is funneling more talented athletes into CYO ball. Football and baseball stars have to commit so much to their sports that there's no time for high school basketball. Some of them use CYO leagues to stay active in the winter.

"A lot of it is just kids managing their time," Seely said. "They get to be seniors and there's a modicum of maturity starting to bubble up, and they're looking at the big picture. If they commit to basketball after having just played football and they're going to play baseball in the spring, they need time to go to school for a while. To date a girl. To get a job."

But most of the CYO players are just kids who like basketball and through skill level or choice don't play for their schools. Seely said the benchmark for him isn't so much whether they win but whether they're better at the end of the season than they were at the beginning.

"You just want the kids to have fun and continue to develop," he said. "Kids have a lot of different skill sets. Not a lot of us are gifted enough physically to play straight-up man defense, but if you can teach them to cover up for themselves, be in certain spaces ... I tell them to act like the other guy is your little brother and bug the heck out of him. For the next four minutes, that's what you do to that guy."

Those little strategies are what makes Seely a good coach. A retired Boeing public affairs official, Seely has a way with words.

"He has a knack for correcting behavior in a humorous way without embarrassing the player," Dwyer said. "He's able to get after them without making them feel bad."

Seely's genial personality doesn't stop at the gym. A sign in front of his house, courtesy of one of his sons, proclaims Seely the "Mayor of Wedgwood." He knows everybody in his Northeast Seattle neighborhood, and everybody knows him. He makes sure of it.

"When people move in, I say, 'We'll leave you alone for 4-6 hours, but then we've got some things we need to tell you about,' " he says with a laugh. "I'm not the oldest guy around, but I've been in the neighborhood 31 or 32 years. Now young people move into the neighborhood and I can tell them about the time that manhole cover blew in '83 and it sounds like a million years ago."

There are the people in any neighborhood who wave to the mailman. Then there are the people who know him by name.

And then there is the guy who happens to witness the mailman getting into an accident where he wasn't at fault, and goes to court to testify to that so the letter carrier doesn't get in trouble with his bosses. That's Paul Seely.

He's the kind of guy who will mow your age into your front lawn on your birthday, the kind of guy who helps organize annual block parties so legendary that people who have moved away come back to town just to attend.

"He's very gregarious," Dwyer said. "The kind of guy a neighborhood rallies around."